


As It Was Made To Be

by orphan_account



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Post Season 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-17
Updated: 2015-05-17
Packaged: 2018-03-31 00:30:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3957676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Emma and Killian pack up her place in New York, and exorcise some ghosts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As It Was Made To Be

**Author's Note:**

> This got fairly weird, but I did (and still do) have a lot of Emma!feels re: the missing years and everything that entails. Title from Mumford and Sons' [_Sigh No More_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DA3fNvbZoBM&list=PL41775772741DFC65).

> _there is a design, an alignment, a cry of my heart to see  
>  the beauty of love, as it was made to be_

“How do you even have all this rubbish, Swan?” Emma hears him ask from the bedroom, and she would really, really love to give him a piece of her mind, another round of the playful banter they’d had going on basically since the day they met. She would really love to make a joke, or roll her eyes, or anything, really – but, Emma’s just realized, she has absolutely no freaking idea of how does she even have all that stuff. Rubbish. Whatever the hell he calls it – she has _no idea_ of how it came in her possession, her mind completely blank.

And it’s freaking her out.

“Swan, is everything –” there’s a sound of steps coming into the kitchen, and then two hands brushing both sides of her face, in a familiar touch she’s come to know so well in the last few days. The last few days, and the Zelena whirlwind, and the year before that, _and then_ –

“Emma.” She hears, from so far away. “Emma, what is it?”

 _Horrible_ , that’s what it is. Have her parents gone through the same thing, when the first curse broke? Had Gold, her first day in Storybrooke? Had Ruby, and Jefferson, and Ashely?

Had Graham, after she kissed him?

Had _Henry_?

When she opens her eyes, she’s looking straight into Killian’s blue, worried gaze. “I’m…” remembering. Panicking. Worried about my son. “I’m fine,” she says, even if she’s not fine at all, but it’s alright because he  gets her anyway.

“Help me with the dishes?” she offers, eventually; and he nods and starts wrapping every single porcelain plate (and seriously _how_ did she get all this, and _when_?) neatly with its paper towels, and then put it gently into the cardboard box. A somewhat unusual way to spend a second date, but surely beats the time-traveling, _Back to the Future_ mess that was their first date; and one good thing about having a consummate sailor as maybe-boyfriend is the _amazing_ packing technique.

So, maybe she’s rambling to herself, a little.

Still better than remembering – or, in her case, _not_ remembering. Not remembering how she woke up one day in a brand house she’d moved into after the Boston fire that never happened, bought with insurance money she’d never had, full of furniture she’d never picked and stale books she’d never read. How Regina even _managed_ it, Emma has no idea.

They finish packing up the house in comfortable silence – and, _god_ , he doesn’t try to force her to talk, her _gets_ her, and Emma had forgotten how wonderful that could feel – and wait for the removal truck that will carry all of her boxes to an address in Redwood Maine, the quaint town just a few miles outside Storybrooke, and a place Emma thinks must be as cursed as their own quaint little town, because there’s no way in hell that Mike Davies the wholesaler still hasn’t realized that’s he’s been selling pork legs to Red Riding Hood and her grandmother for years.

Or maybe he just forgot.

Damn how she hates that stupid word.

They load the car with everything else – things that fit inside, none of the stupid plates; mostly clothes (some of them she bought for herself, some she didn’t) and Henry’s school stuff, and a few DVDs and books (some Emma remember, some she doesn’t) and when they’re done is the middle of the afternoon, too late to leave, too early to do anything else.

Somehow, they end up in Central Park, and it’s not a coincidence when they sit down on the same bench she handcuffed him to, a month or so ago – and still it feels like a lifetime. Killian lets out an hearty laugh when he realizes where they are, and makes an elaborate show of looking around ‘looking for your lawkeeper friends,’ he says.

“They probably wouldn’t recognize you,” Emma tells him, even though it’s not completely true. At her insistence, he traded in the vest for a Henley shirt and left the heavy coat in the car, but Killian is still Killian, down to the earring and leather pants and swaggering walk, and Emma amuses herself with the thought of just _how the hell_ she’d be supposed to explain him if they ran into someone who knew her.

Someone who knew her when she was dating Walsh.

“Are you ever going to tell me what is it?” he asks at one point, and Emma realizes that maybe, just maybe, she’s been sighing a little too deeply.

“Nothing’s wr –” she starts saying, automatically, before she realizes just whom she’s talking to – probably the only person in her life she can actually tell what the hell is going on, and maybe – _just maybe_ – she’ll feel better about, in the end. They’re so very new and so very fragile; but it was only four weeks ago, in that very spot, that he told her to _take a leap of faith_ , and so she does.

“When I first got to Storybrooke,” she begins, and he looks so surprised that she’s actually opening up that Emma’s torn between feeling moved at his reaction and actually shitty that she waited so long.

“Henry kept talking about this curse, and how no one aged but him, and I didn’t believe because,” Emma had to pause there, looking for the right words. It feels so strange to say it out loud, after she’s been running away from magic curses and all the package for _so long_. “Because, I thought that was impossible. I mean, how couldn’t people notice that they weren’t aging?”

“And Henry said they just _forgot_.”

They just forgot; Emma remembered asking her mother – Miss Blanchard, the fifth grade teacher – just how long Regina’d been major, just how long John Doe had been in that coma, how long that clock had been broken. And she hadn’t known, none of them had; and now she knows exactly how that _feels_ , and it’s horrible.

“And I think I might be freaking out,” she continues. _Understatement of the century_. “Because I’m supposed to be this all-mighty Saviour, and I just got cursed just like everyone else, and there are things in my house that I didn’t buy and just –” she has to pause again, take a breath. “It just _sucks_.”

Killian – the idiot, the bastard, the stupid _pirate_ – only raises an eyebrow at her. “And?” he asks; but he’s got his good arm swung across her shoulders, tightening. “You are feeling bad… because you are feeling bad that the queen messed with your mind?”

“Pretty much?” Emma offers. He looks at her and that horrible crushing weight in her chest just… deflates, like she was a child who’d just found out that the horrible monster under her bed was only an oddly-shaped piece of cloth and nothing more. “I tried not to think about…. magic,” she manages to add, with only the minimum wince at the word. _Making progresses here, Emma, talking about magic with your brand new pirate boyfriend in Central Park_. “And then you asked me where I got my stuff, and I had no idea, and I just… lost control for a minute.”

And Killian of all people knew everything that there was to know about Emma and control.

They remain like that, side by side, as the sun goes down and the sky turns purple and it’s definitely time to go (“because, Central Park and night, that’s just asking for trouble,” she tells him, and he grins back at her) and maybe find someplace more interesting to be – because this is the City That Never Sleeps, after all, and they got an entire night ahead.

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr](http://www.qvcksilver.tumblr.com/).


End file.
